Yearning to listen

November 10, 2007

After spending all of the summer sat about doing little else but sitting about contemplating my navel and listening to music the return to work this last month has been a bit of a shock to the system. The ridiculously early start to my working day (out of bed at 4.30AM) has meant that my usual preferred listening time, late in the evening has become impossible to maintain as I’m now sound asleep by 11PM.

Listening to music in the late afternoon / early evening is a very different kettle of fish. There are more distractions at this time of the day. Obviously there is still some daylight about and more activity from outside the house seeping in. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the continual interruptions from my brother’s appalling taste in music and the general noise about the house certainly are. I’m not used to the shops still being open when I have some free time, and often I end up cooking and listening to music at the same time. So the music continues to arrive here at its usual rate, but as I’ve struggled to sit down and listen the as yet unheard pile has begun to get out of hand again after I finally managed to clear it down over the summer. There’s probably around 40 unlistened to discs about here right now.

So I was very pleased this morning to have some time off of work when I could spend some quality time with Mr and Mrs Left and Right speaker. Some great music absorbed this morning included the Mitsuhiro Yoshimura / Taku Sugimoto disc, more about which somewhere soon, the Tim Feeney / Vic Rawlings duo on Sedimental that I have enjoyed a few times recently, a dreadful recording of what I think sounded like a good performance of Mahler’s First Symphony from a ludicrously cheap (and now I know why) box set I picked up recently, and finally a couple of years after its release Jean-Luc Guionnet’s splendid Tirets recording for church organ on the Hibari label.

Why tell you all this? No idea really, other than to share my joy at being able to spend some time like this and to show that I am still capable of writing posts of less than 5000 words….

I’ve just put on Noid’s You’re not here, another good one. Wish you were though.

Comments (3)

Cheers for playing the track with Patrick on Sunday, Richard! Sorry not to see you at the tentet gig (I’m informed by Catherine Pluygers that the pedantically minded would say the word should be decet, but if it’s good enough for Peter Brotzmann …) but see you somewhere soon I hope

Hi Dom, yeah I really like your stuff with Patrick. I particularly like the fact that often I struggle to tell what is percussion and what is bass, but then I’m easily confused…

yes sorry about the decet (we had better say decet, plenty of pedantic people trawling the web..:) As you started to play I was only just getting free of the clutches of the M25 having sat on it for nearly two hours. The reports on it I’ve heard sound good though, which just rubs it in really, but I’m glad it went well.